With the massive proliferation of victimless crime laws this is
what has become of your friendly hometown neighborhood
cop-on-the-beat. (Wikimedia Commons)
When you hear that some libertarians who typically call themselves Anarcho-Capitalists, or AnCaps, want to abolish government entirely do you respond with gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair?
“Without government we’ll have nothing but chaos,” you might gasp in dismay.
But think about how much chaos government creates.
Government takes something like 50% of our incomes in all forms of hidden and unhidden taxes and spends it lavishly on things that no non-government person would ever dream of, like forming a blue-ribbon committee of politically-connected academic bureaucrats to study the sex life of the snot-nosed gecko.
Repeatedly stealing your money and passing it around through the government spoils system means you can never know how much of your own money you’ll get to keep and spend the way you want, maybe for frivolous stuff like food, clothing, shelter, education for your children or retirement for yourself.
That’s government-created chaos.
But without police and other law enforcement there will be roving gangs of outlaws,” you might complain.
Ah, but the police and other law enforcement have become those roving gangs of outlaws themselves.
If you’re sitting peacefully on your couch in your own living room sucking on a state-approved doctor-prescribed medicinal marijuana cigarette and neither harming nor threatening anyone, the federal FBI and DEA SWATbots can kick in your door and smash your face into the carpet and handcuff you and steal your stash and work hand-in-pocket with government prosecutors and judges and jailers to lock you away for a very long time.
That’s government-created chaos.
Or maybe you’re just strolling along on the concrete of a city street, neither harming nor threatening anyone, but because you look vaguely Iranian or Afghani or Upper Wazooistani the DHS can kidnap you right off the street with one of their blacked-out-window Obama Motors-owned Chevy Suburbans and browbeat you and waterboard you (like you really think that's been outlawed) and hold you in a tiny dark room for days or months or years without ever telling anyone where you are.
That’s government-created chaos.
Or maybe BATF will steal your guns for not obeying a rat’s nest of unconstitutional byzantine “laws” imposed on you without your consent or knowledge, even as you are neither harming nor threatening anyone.
Or maybe your local councilcrats will collude with their local developer buddies to form a scam called a “Public/Private Partnership,” rewritten eminent domain laws be damned, and yank your home right out from under you even as you are neither harming nor threatening anyone.Or maybe your car is ticketed or booted or towed because you failed to observe some picayune automotive rule while neither harming nor threatening anyone.
Get the picture? In the day-to-day lives of the majority of American people, roving bands of government law enforcers cause more chaos than roving bands of nongovernment outlaws.
This is just a tiny fraction of the chaos created by today’s out-of-control federal, state and local governments.
Cops who protect us from the coercion of others are legitimate law enforcers. Those who coerce us by enforcing laws against politically contrived victimless crimes are just government goons.
But if you're really a good citizen government-hugger just keep blindly repeating, "If you're innocent you have nothing to fear from the government."
You can even repeat it from your jail cell.
Comments
We're such menaces to society, wanting to be responsible for our own actions...See you in Guantanamo! Excellent article, as always. LBT
I think you hit a nail on the head when you said "today's out-of-control" government. It is out of the people's control, and quickly becoming evil in many of the ways you point out. However, it's not such a fine point to distinguish between bad government and good government. You cede the legitimacy of "cops who protect us from the coercion of others" and I quite agree, but you won't have any kind of cops at all if you don't have some form of government. I think it might be very easy for people looking around themselves today to think that all government is bad and that we'd be so much better off without any of it. But this is not so, as has been noticed by philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. We do need a social contract to live in (relative) peace and prosperity, and it's easy to overlook that in our modern lives, to fail to notice how many things we have only because there is a government and civil society to provide them. So the question really is what form of govt, not whether.
Government is "slow chaos" compared to the "rapid anarchy" of freedom.
Deborah S might do well to recognize that there is no such thing as "good government" if it is imposed externally (as opposed to "self control"). Even those parts she seems to like are financed throught theft and coercion and harm many, many innocent people. That is my definition of "evil". Philosophers of old, as long as they supported government, were dead wrong.
I have actually *signed* the only "social contract" I need: The Covenant of Unanimous Consent. Anything else that is forced on me by accident of birth is not binding upon me.
I think you hit a nail on the head when you said "today's out-of-control" government. It is out of the people's control, and quickly becoming evil in many of the ways you point out. However, it's not such a fine point to distinguish between bad government and good government. You cede the legitimacy of "cops who protect us from the coercion of others" and I quite agree, but you won't have any kind of cops at all if you don't have some form of government. I think it might be very easy for people looking around themselves today to think that all government is bad and that we'd be so much better off without any of it. But this is not so, as has been noticed by philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. We do need a social contract to live in (relative) peace and prosperity, and it's easy to overlook that in our modern lives, to fail to notice how many things we have only because there is a government and civil society to provide them. So the question really is what form of govt, not whether.
I think you hit a nail on the head when you said "today's out-of-control" government. It is out of the people's control, and quickly becoming evil in many of the ways you point out. However, it's not such a fine point to distinguish between bad government and good government. You cede the legitimacy of "cops who protect us from the coercion of others" and I quite agree, but you won't have any kind of cops at all if you don't have some form of government. I think it might be very easy for people looking around themselves today to think that all government is bad and that we'd be so much better off without any of it. But this is not so, as has been noticed by philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. We do need a social contract to live in (relative) peace and prosperity, and it's easy to overlook that in our modern lives, to fail to notice how many things we have only because there is a government and civil society to provide them. So the question really is what form of govt, not whether.
Deb seems to have developed a stuttering problem. :)
The difference is VOLUNTARY. "Good government" is that which is formed by mutual consent, voluntary association and free trade. It happens all the time, all around us. Most folks simply do not recognize this as the moral and logical alternative to force and theft type "government."
There is no good form of involuntary government, the "will of the majority" imposed on everyone else, and theft to finance it.
Ahem. My posts do seem to have had a stuttering problem, but I didn't do it! Honest! :)
Thank you for seriously responding to the question I posed. I am not for our current form of government, but yet I wouldn't want to live in a society with no government. I like electricity and all the fun and useful things you can do with it, and a host of other things we take for granted in our modern lives that we might not have if there was no government at all. Maybe we would and maybe we wouldn't.
The concept of voluntary government is a very appealing one, and I quite agree that a force and theft government, as you put it, is quite onerous. My biggest problem with the idea of voluntary government is that it sounds great, if there are enough volunteers who volunteer to do the right thing. And if there aren't enough volunteers you won't have a government. It would be possible to live that way, like they did in the wild west days, but would that life really be better?
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